Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  My refusal to compose came to be considered the trumpet of war. There was immediate escalation. Marie-Anne harmed me the best way she knew how: she hurt herself. She refused to go to the gym, refused to do her breathing exercises, refused to write down the daily list of things she was grateful for, and ate foods high in carbohydrates and sugar. In the bathroom she didn’t let herself break out into song. She never stomped her feet and moved her hips to music as the doctor had suggested. She didn’t call her friends or even go out shopping. It was all aimed at heightening her cortisol.

  She ballooned, again. The expansion started on the face, as it did always, and the cheekbones were submerged. Within a week her shoulders widened, her hips and thighs thickened, and there was a dour pudginess to her. In two weeks she went from brick to sponge. In the third week her hair started thinning, she developed acne on her face, a rash on her inner arm, and lesion-like bruises on her body. I glimpsed them in the bathroom mirror before she had a chance to close the door.

  In the first few weeks of her vengeance she was reluctant to give up the years of progress, so she had, at least, eaten home-cooked meals. But by week four she ordered out every time. Greasy fries, greasier chicken fingers. All the salads and gluten-free things in the cupboards expired and grew stale and got thrown out. The only healthy thing she did was eat the vitamins from the unmarked bottle.

  She had been good for so long. And now, while rendering me responsible, she had thrown it all away. She was taking us back to where we had been three years earlier. Except this time we didn’t have any of the warmth, any of the trust, any of the fidelity that had allowed us to struggle together. This time she wanted my love turned into pity, and from pity an obedience to emanate. She wanted my obligation, not my ardor.

  One evening during the fifth week she tore into her closet with scissors in hand, and disemboweled and exenterated all of her new clothes, the ones that didn’t fit anymore because she had put on twenty pounds. She cried loud and wheezing, and sitting with my back against the wall in the hallway, hearing the slashing and the tearing, I cried too. Those weren’t just clothes she was slaughtering. They were poems, they were the beauty of her recovering body, they were the memories of our united resistance against the insensitive and cruel imbalance inside her genes. Once, we had been good enough to bond and beat back millions of years of mitochondrial mutations. Now we weren’t even good enough to talk.

  One of these days she or I would pack our bags and go. It seemed as inevitable as the tyranny of cortisol.

  * * *

  My mother had been a subtle woman, indirect, of few words. Much of this had to do with her aborted career as a journalist in the Old World. Once idealistic and activist, she had been silenced by some landed interests—something involving a picture of a rape room—and from that day onward had taken to speaking in a roundabout way, fearful of persecution, cautious to a fault. Much like the Pilgrims of yester-centuries, she brought her circumspect inclination with her to America and carried it into the relationship with my father and then to communication with me. “Look, there is a grocery cart in the middle of the parking lot. I wonder if it’ll hit a car.” That was how Mother taught me morality. No pointing to codes or tablets or commandments. Just a roundabout way. I understood why she had tucked the Koran into a corner of the house. Rather than having a conversation with me, it was better for her if I just had that conversation with myself.

  The one time that Mother had dropped her preference for the oblique occurred the last time she visited. Marie-Anne had been unwell for some time. We weren’t sure it was a cortisol spike then and had been giving her a diet that might resist hypothyroidism, the other possible diagnosis. Mother—as I called her—had gone with me to Reading Terminal to help buy some foods containing iodine, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, and vitamins A, B, and D. After she made a joke about how the letters a-b-d formed the root for a West Asian word for slave, she said that she needed to discuss Marie-Anne.

  “I do not want you to be offend,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “She should not look like this,” Mother said, puffing her cheeks and jutting out her elbows. “It is not good in marriage.”

  “What isn’t good?”

  “Bad appearance,” Mother said. “It will kill feeling. It is known that men need attractive.”

  “She’s beautiful. You remember her at the wedding.”

  “She was. But even then, very big and tall.”

  “She will be fine.”

  “What if it takes years? What will happen to you? A man cannot be with a woman who looks off.”

  “Nothing will happen to me. I love her. We will stay together.”

  “What if she never deflate?”

  By this time I grew angry. I wanted to make assertive exclamations. To tell Mother how upsetting it was to have this sort of skepticism cast upon our love. It reminded me of what Mrs. Quinn had done. She had also doubted me on the basis of physicality. In her case it was something I lacked. In my mother’s case it was something Marie-Anne lacked (or, rather, accumulated). I concluded that both mothers were the same. They were not comfortable verbalizing the true bases of their prejudices so they highlighted alternative shortcomings in their children.

  That conversation at Reading Terminal changed our relationship. I could see, driving home that day, as we wound through the falling cherry blossoms in Fairmount, that Mother realized she had rattled me. Remorse had been writ all over her, like fur on a wolf. But I didn’t believe it was the right kind of remorse. She was aggrieved that I was upset. She was not upset with herself for her position. The recognition prompted me to adopt a posture of hermetic silence toward her, the same kind of taciturn stance that had marked her life. I maintained my silence throughout the duration of her trip.

  Two weeks after she got back to Alabama, she passed away.

  It was somewhere during that trip that Mother had booby-trapped my apartment.

  Chapter Five

  For the first time in our marriage, Marie-Anne and I ignored each other’s birthdays. Marie-Anne gained reprieve from the apartment by going to the MimirCo offices as frequently as she could. It seemed like she was always in Virginia. Perhaps it was a prelude to her finding a place there.

  Loneliness brought memories of Richard Konigsberg. He had been the one I used to get drunk with when things with Marie-Anne went sour. He had not been the biggest proponent of the institution of marriage; but when it came to Marie-Anne, he made arguments that impressed upon me the importance of stability and structure. He always said that making it in America was a multigenerational enterprise, and that it wasn’t in the cards for me to achieve both social advancement and freedom at the same time. I had to choose the former. “It will be the next generation that will get to have the benefit of doing whatever they want,” he’d said. “It’s for them that your sacrifices must happen. It’s for them that you must marry a good girl from a good, established family and stick it out.” That sacrifice was the primary reason I wanted to have children. Their existence would legitimize the effort I had put into maintaining a loving relationship in the face of the longest odds. They needed to be born so that I could tell them all that I had done for them, much the same way my parents used to tell me all that they had done in order to leave their home country and make it in America. Progeny was how a debtor became a creditor.

  Valentine’s Day came and went without acknowledgment. Without Richard to mope with I reached out to Ali Ansari. When he learned that I didn’t have plans with Marie-Anne he sent me a text with red hearts in it and announced that he was going to take me out. “Something to offset the internment!”

  I met him on Ben Franklin Parkway, at the beginning of the alphabetized row of flags belonging to every country in the world. The only flag not alphabetically placed was Israel, which was on the pole closest to city hall, even before Afghanistan and Albania.

  Ali and I started out at Reading Terminal and ate brisket at an Amish kiosk. With
drinks in hand we sat on the steps of city hall and watched the workers on the scaffolding around the building as they wiped away hundreds of years of grime.

  Philadelphia, Ali Ansari said, was America’s pretty but rebellious daughter. She subjected herself to piercings and ugly makeup and tattered clothing and abstained from showering, as if there was authenticity to be found in shirking the established norms. Philly was shy inside, he said. She didn’t want people looking at her; but the shyness came from wisdom. Philly understood that when you reveal yourself, the world starts expecting you to maintain yourself. Beauty is a slavery. But now Philly was washing up. Getting her hair done. Adding highlights. It was out of character. He said she would regret her decision.

  “Maybe the city will attract more people. More diversity?”

  “Multiculturalism? It’s a recipe for estrangement. Everyone performing their pantomime. You just realize how different we are from one another.”

  The sun hit us on the face, energizing us to move. Ali suggested a trip to Northern Liberties. He wanted to show me something weird. We took the subway under the Galleria and the jewelry shops, under Independence Hall, all the way to the riverfront, until we emerged near the Ben Franklin Bridge. The river was pepper gray. It gave the sun no surfaces to twinkle in.

  We stayed on this side of the river, looking out toward Camden. I had only been to Camden once, when Marie-Anne and I had gone to do a little circumambulation of Walt Whitman’s grave. The lone man in history who had become one with America.

  We soon arrived at a refurbished warehouse. I was expecting some kind of hipster convocation. What I saw instead was a roped wrestling ring surrounded by two levels of seating. There were a few stout men of Irish descent taking their seats, beers in hand, holding the fight card, placing wagers.

  “The Extreme Wrestling Association of Philadelphia,” Ali Ansari said, and nudged and pushed me toward the front row. The smell of turpentine mixed with sawdust and talcum; it had an intensity that brought the warehouse to life. The steel and stone and aching bone that had been used up in its past. The night shift, with minimal light, sedate faces hammering out metal parts and metal gizmos with which America armored itself and strode forth into the inhospitable world, manifesting a destiny outward after having mastered its interior.

  We waited half an hour for the seats to fill up. Most of the audience members were factory stiffs and other longtime residents from Northeast Philadelphia. The show, meanwhile, had all the ingredients of the kind of wrestling popularized by the WWF, WWE, and Vince McMahon. But there was a twist—it was much more violent. The wrestlers bled more, threw themselves from higher ladders, and tossed each other into the bleachers in order to inflict pain that would be deemed more and more believable.

  We had come to see the main event, which featured a massive, bearded wrestler named Marty Martel. He had a cross tattooed on his stomach. He entered the arena to Norwegian death metal music and carried a great broadsword in his hand that he handed off to his manager, a smaller guy wearing a crown and robes; his name was Charlie Main.

  Marty Martel was a face. Once he was in the ring he gave a long speech about kicking out all the immigrants who were stealing good American jobs. This earned him a lot of laughter and support. In the middle of his speech he was interrupted by the heel, a masked Mexican wrestler named Gonzo, who lambasted Marty for denying his family an opportunity to pursue the American dream. The crowd booed Gonzo and cheered for Marty. They were egged on by Charlie Main, who walked around the arena swinging the broadsword and saying gibberish in mock Spanish. I found myself rooting for the heel, though in the face of Marty Martel’s large following I didn’t cheer out loud. Ali Ansari wasn’t so shy. He stood and rooted for Gonzo, screaming at him to “choke the fucking cracker.” It shocked me that no one else in the audience seemed to find Martel’s commentary offensive.

  After a number of super kicks and iron claws the fight turned in Gonzo’s favor; he made Martel submit with a mean camel clutch. But the apparent victory was thwarted when Charlie Main jumped into the ring and distracted the referee by complaining that Gonzo was an illegal immigrant and didn’t have the work authorization to be in the ring in the first place. The referee tried to tell Charlie Main that such bureaucratic things didn’t matter in the ring, which was a place of honor, a place of equality. But as the two men had their dramatic discussion, thoroughly engrossed in each other, Martel was able to slither out of the camel clutch and pinned Gonzo with a suplex. As the reversal took place, Charlie Main excitedly directed the referee’s attention back to the action and within seconds the referee was on the floor, counting Gonzo out. Not wanting to give the judges a chance to review the end of the fight, Marty Martel and Charlie Main ran out of the ring and toward the tunnel.

  The masked Mexican wrestler, now all alone in the ring, with only Ali Ansari’s support in the audience, was left stomping mad, clutching his hair, beating his chest. On his way out of the ring he took hold of the announcer’s microphone and vowed that he would exact justice against the entire association, going so far as to challenge the referee to a match. That fight was scheduled for next Wednesday. The crowd roared their approval and booed Gonzo out of the arena.

  There were more fights scheduled for the evening, but Ali Ansari said he had seen all he had come for and we headed back to Center City, for beer and mussels at Monk’s.

  “I had no idea these things were so political,” I said.

  “Wrestling represents the American narrative like nothing else. Any issue there is, it can address. Liberal versus conservative. Antiwar versus prowar. Man versus woman. Rich versus poor. Wrestling’s got it all.”

  “All this time I thought it was just a bunch of fake pummeling.”

  “The fighting is fake,” Ali Ansari said, “but that’s not why people go there. People go for the story. It’s social drama.”

  “I take it Gonzo is a friend of yours and we came to support him?”

  “I don’t know Gonzo. I came for Marty Martel. Whose real name is Martin Mirandella.”

  It turned out that Martin Mirandella had once been a wrestler in the WWE, where he’d played a heel called Hasan Hussain. He had been managed by the same guy who now played Charlie Main. Back then Charlie was called Rasheed Shaheed, though originally he was an Irish kid from Maryland. Their story in the WWE was that they were a pair of Arab cousins from Dearborn, Michigan, who were fed up with the way the United States treated its Muslim minorities, and wanted nothing more than to expose the manner in which they were denied their fair shot at the title.

  “Basically it wouldn’t matter who they beat,” Ali Ansari explained. “The association would always find a way to deny them the title shot. This only caused Hasan to fight harder and beat more guys. After each fight he demanded a title shot and every time the association, playing the part of the racist, or the oppressive white man controlling the glass ceiling, turned him down. People loved it. Hasan became one of the best heels in years. But the more wrestlers he beat the more the other wrestlers turned against him. At one rumble that I remember, all nine of the other wrestlers stopped fighting each other when he entered the ring and ganged up to beat him up.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “What happened next will break your heart,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s what prompted me to make a documentary on the guy.”

  It turned out that the WWE writers had gotten lazy with Hasan’s act, and instead of keeping him going as a victim with some understandable anger issues, they started heaping terrorist imagery on him.

  “It was as if they couldn’t imagine a Muslim as honorable, as having a point, as being on the cusp of heroism. One Monday night, on Hasan’s behalf, a gang of four men dressed in ski masks carried out a mock execution of one of the WWE referees who had cheated Hasan out of a sure win. The bit went too far. It evoked al-Qaeda and whatnot. Huge mistake. The network that aired the show flipped out and declared that Hasan Hussain and Rasheed Shaheed couldn’t ever again show
their faces on the network. Martin Mirandella lost his contract. His promising career was destroyed. All because he had the misfortune of playing the role of a Muslim in American wrestling. Now he’s in this low-end independent association, playing the role of a European supremacist, the second coming of Charles Martel who fought Muslim invaders in the eighth century.”

  “And Rasheed Shaheed is Charlemagne, the king who backed Charles Martel . . .” I knew all the pivotal moments in the making of the West. “How ironic.”

  “It’s not irony they are going for,” Ali Ansari said. “They really hate Islam now. It’s unjust what happened to these guys. I want to show that to the world.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “This whole thing played out in front of millions of viewers, yet people still don’t know Martin Mirandella was born in Italy to Catholic parents or that Charlie Main’s dad is Brian O’Brien from Annapolis, and runs a pub. Half of America watched these kids get screwed and forgot about it in the blink of an eye. I want to remind them.”

  “Are these guys even open to the documentary?” I asked. “I can’t imagine he would want anything to do with Muslims anymore.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking on Martin’s behalf or mine. The scimitar that had swiped his head was the same one that had taken mine. I pictured the media executive who had cut Martin. He probably looked like George Gabriel. He probably considered himself on the frontline of protecting America, or the West, or “our way of life,” somehow capable of identifying every sign of Islamic supremacism. If I hadn’t been conditioned against it, I would have thought there was a central place where leading American men were trained to declare people infiltrators and traitors.